


The Odd One

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe, Capital Punishment, Execution, Gen, Irish Civil War, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-23
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 20:27:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3991663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Historical AU: Alec and Ralph found themselves on opposite sides of the Irish Civil War.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: reference to judicial killing, imminent character death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Odd One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



It was so often the foreigners, Alec mused, grinding out his cigarette with a force that belied the lightness of the thought: Pearse, de Valera, Maud Gonne. And Ralph. That bloody Englishman, they called him, except English was the adjective and the noun censorable. The Gael was essentially timid, and thus, given power, authoritarian; the Ulster Scot pragmatic, turning intransigent. True fanaticism was the preserve of the outsider. _Pragmatism_ , he thought derisively. Was that what had put him on the same side as that filthy spoiled priest O’Higgins, set him against the man he had loved? (Scratch _had_.) He looked down at a week-old paper, crisp and curling on the common-room table amid a pile of miscellaneous litter. _MR CHURCHILL IN DUNDEE_ : ‘No man has done more harm or shown more genuine malice or endeavoured to bring a greater curse upon the common people of Ireland than this strange being, actuated by a deadly and malignant hatred for the land of his birth.’ On ‘strange being,’ Alec considered ruefully, he could concur with the politician responsible for Tonypandy and the Tans. None more romantic or quixotic than Ralph, arrested in silk pyjamas for possession of a keepsake. There was still a chance that the tribunal would not―surely they _could_ not―oh God, who the hell was he trying to fool? And the Republicans would be as glad to be rid of him as the Government was: stem the spate of shrill, embarrassing propaganda pamphlets and give them one more martyr for old Ireland with the same shot to the heart. Alec lit another cigarette: it drew awkwardly, the flame ripping down one side of the paper. 

'I can’t go on,' he mumbled flatly. 'I’ll go on.'

**Author's Note:**

> 'foreigners': Patrick Pearse's father was originally from Birmingham though his maternal ancestry was thoroughly Gaelic, Eamon de Valera was the American-born son of an Irish immigrant mother and a Spanish father (this is not the place to go into de Valera's paternal history, but it's quite interesting and not a little murky), Maud Gonne was born in Surrey and after the death of her mother was brought up mainly in France; her father had distant Anglo-Irish ancestry.
> 
> Ralph's actions and implied fate are those of [Erskine Childers.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Erskine_Childers) Childers was arrested in November 1922 at his home, according to the Dáil report, 'getting out of bed with a revolver' (his attire is, as far as I know, not recorded, but it seemed like a good outing for Ralph's canonical nightwear). The 'keepsake' was a gun given to Childers by Michael Collins. Childers was sentenced to death by a military tribunal; he appealed to the civilian judiciary but was executed while the appeal was pending.
> 
> O'Higgins: Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Justice in the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State. O'Higgins studied for the priesthood at Maynooth and Carlow Seminary, hence the term 'spoiled priest', Hiberno-English for a seminary student who drops out before ordination.
> 
> Tonypandy and the Tans: Winston Churchill sanctioned the use of military force against striking miners in the Rhonnda in 1910; he was instrumental in the intervention of paramilitaries ('Black and Tans') in the Irish war of 1919-21. 
> 
> The final lines are an anachronistic appearance from Samuel Beckett, _The Unnameable_ (1953).


End file.
